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SEGREGATION ACADEMIES STILL OPERATE ACROSS THE SOUTH. ONE TOWN
GRAPPLES WITH ITS DIVIDED SCHOOLS  
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Jennifer Berry Hawes
May 18, 2024
Propublica
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_ Seventy years after Brown v. Board, Black and white residents, in
Camden, Alabama, say they would like to see their children schooled
together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to make it
happen. _

A segregated classroom at Boykin Elementary School in Wilcox County,
Alabama, in 1966., Bob Fitch Photography Archive, Stanford University
Library

 

_ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign
up for The Big Story newsletter
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to receive stories like this one in your inbox_.

A mile of Alabama country road, and a history of racism, separate the
two schools. At the stop sign between them, even the road’s name
changes. Threadgill Road, christened for a civil rights hero, becomes
Whiskey Run. Black students take Threadgill to one campus; white
students turn off Whiskey Run toward the other.

Both schools are shrinking. Wilcox County, a notch in the swath of old
plantation country known as the Black Belt, struggles with declining
population — a common scenario across this part of the South. In
such places, the existence of two separate school systems can isolate
entire communities by race.

The private school, Wilcox Academy, is what researchers call a
“segregation academy
[[link removed]]”
due to the historic whiteness of its student body and the timing of
its opening. It’s down to 200 students across 12 grades. Housed in a
single-story building with beige siding and brown brick veneer, the
school offers chapel and core academic classes but not music, theater
or band programs.

Down the road, the county’s public high school has more students and
course options. Wilcox Central High’s building, with a
medical-training lab and competition-sized swimming pool, could house
1,000 students. Instead, it barely draws 400, virtually all of them
Black, from across the entire 888-square-mile county.

Divisions like this have long played out across the region. In 1954,
the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board
of Education [[link removed]],
declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. As the federal
courts repeatedly ruled against the South’s massive resistance, many
white people pivoted to a new tactic, one that is lesser known and yet
profoundly influences the Black Belt region today: They created a web
of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of private schools to educate white
children.

Now, 70 years after the Brown decision, ProPublica has found about 300
schools that likely opened as segregation academies in the South are
still operating. Some have flourished into pricey college-prep
behemoths. Others, like Wilcox Academy, remain modest Christian
schools. Many have accepted more nonwhite students over the years, and
some now come close to reflecting the communities they serve.

But across Alabama’s 18 Black Belt counties, all of the remaining
segregation academies ProPublica identified — about a dozen — are
still vastly white, even though the region’s population is majority
Black. And in the towns where these schools operate, they often
persist as a dividing force.

Even when rural segregation academies offer fewer amenities than their
public-school counterparts, white parents are often unwilling to
voluntarily send their children to majority-Black public schools. That
can be to the detriment of all students, especially in struggling
communities where money is tight. It means doubling up on school
overhead costs, and fewer students at each school means neither one
can offer the robust programs that they could provide if their
resources were combined.

“You’re dividing money you don’t have in half,” said Bryan
Mann, a University of Kansas professor who studies school segregation
and school choice.

And soon, far more tax dollars will be flowing into private schools.
Republican lawmakers are adopting plans for massive infusions of state
money to help thousands more students who want to attend them. It’s
part of a movement barreling across the country, particularly the
Southeast — where, in Black Belt counties like Wilcox, a segregation
academy may be the only nearby private school option.

In March, Alabama’s Republican Gov. Kay Ivey, who is from Wilcox
County, signed the CHOOSE Act
[[link removed]].
It creates a program of voucher-like education savings accounts and
directs the state legislature to devote no less than $100 million a
year to fund them. Students can apply for up to $7,000 a year to pay
for private school tuition, among other costs.

Since the start of 2023, North Carolina
[[link removed]],
Arkansas
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and Florida
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joined Alabama
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opening voucher-style programs to all students over the coming years,
as opposed to limiting them to lower-income students or those in
low-performing schools. South Carolina
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created one that extends to middle-income and some upper-income
families. Georgia [[link removed]]
adopted its own for children in low-performing public schools.
Governors in Texas
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and Tennessee
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pledged to continue similar fights next year.

To Alabama native Steve Suitts, history is repeating.

After the Brown decision, Southern legislatures provided state money
to help white students flee to the new academies. Alabama was among
the first states to do so, said Suitts, a historian and author of
“Overturning Brown: The Segregationist Legacy of the Modern School
Choice Movement.” Even the language used — framing the movement as
parents’ right to “freedom” and “private school choice” —
was the same then as it is now.

“I cannot see how there will be any difference,” Suitts said of
recent laws. He dubbed Alabama’s new voucher-style program the
Segregation Academy Rescue Act.

Republican lawmakers strongly disagree. They argue that today Black
and white students alike can use the money to attend private schools.
The new law bars participating schools from discriminating based on
race
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though it does allow them to choose which applicants they want to
admit.

During House debate earlier this year, Republican state Rep. Danny
Garrett, the education budget chair, heard many Black legislators
argue that the law is about race, its aim to bolster segregation.
“Of course, neither of these statements are true,” he told them.

In Camden, the pastoral county seat of Wilcox, Black and white
residents said they would like to see their children schooled
together. But after so long apart, they aren’t sure how to best do
that.

High school juniors Jazmyne Posey and Samantha Cook hadn’t met until
they started working at Black Belt Treasures, a nonprofit in downtown
Camden that sells the wares of hundreds of Black Belt artists.

On the surface, the teenagers appear to have little in common. Jazmyne
is Black; Samantha is white. Jazmyne likes rap and hip-hop; Samantha
likes indie pop. Jazmyne goes to the public school; Samantha goes to
Wilcox Academy.

But they soon bonded over similar life experiences and problems, both
teenagers navigating high school relationships. They wonder what it
would be like to be in class together. Would their friends get along?

Once, when they hadn’t worked together for a while, Jazmyne missed
talking to Samantha. “I caught word that she said she missed me
too,” she said.

Samantha has watched her class at Wilcox Academy shrink from 22 to 13
students. She likes her writing classes but wishes the school offered
more, especially a theater program. “I definitely would have been a
theater kid,” she said. One day, she hopes to join her sister in
Atlanta: “There’s so many different cultures, so many people to
meet.”

Jazmyne’s grandmother, who died this spring, attended the public
high school a few years after desegregation. By then, most white
students had left for the new academies. Although racism caused
segregation, Jazmyne doesn’t think it’s the cause of the ongoing
divisions.

“Nobody around here is really racist,” she said. “We just
haven’t come together. We’ve been doing our own thing all the
time.”

Roots of Division

Sheryl Threadgill-Matthews grew up immersed in the urgency and hope of
the Civil Rights Movement. Her father was a prominent activist and
chaplain of Camden Academy, a private Presbyterian school for Black
children. Her mother taught at the school. The entire family lived,
learned and worshiped on the campus, perched atop a grassy knoll
called Hangman’s Hill.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of her father’s college classmates,
spoke at commencement [[link removed]] in 1954.
The grounds soon became a hub for staging civil rights marches and
boycotts — landing it in the crosshairs of white school officials.

In 1965, the Wilcox County school board exercised eminent domain to
take over the property. They kept the school open for several more
years but evicted the Threadgills from their home and forced her
father and his parishioners to tear down the school’s church.

She witnessed the dismantling. Someone burned a cross in their yard.

The family pressed forward. A year later, when she was a freshman,
Threadgill-Matthews arrived at Wilcox County High, then a public
school for white children. It was Sept. 23, 1966, and she would become
one of the first nine Black students to cross the county’s racial
line that day.

Grand white columns flanked the front door to the red brick building.
She was grateful that her father walked her inside. Even after he
left, the morning passed quietly. But it was a fleeting relief. Over
the coming months, students rammed her desk with their chairs. They
ripped her books apart. They brushed chalk dust into her hair. They
smacked her head with crutches.

One day in science class, a boy sneered: “Nigger, if you make more
than me on the test, I’m gonna kill you.” When she did so, he
hurled something at her head so hard that she fell unconscious in the
hallway.

She endured for the school year, then pleaded to return to Camden
Academy. So did most of the students who’d come with her.

By then, white families across the South had launched the segregation
academy movement.

In Alabama, it ramped up after a federal court ordered Tuskegee High
School to desegregate. White parents scrambled to open a segregation
academy [[link removed]], which Gov.
George Wallace soon toured. He urged more like it to open — and
called on state lawmakers to help.

In 1965, the state’s legislature approved $3.75 million
[[link removed]]
— worth about $36 million today — to fund tuition grants that paid
for students “to attend private schools rather than go to public
school classes with Negroes,” the Alabama Journal reported.

Six other Southern states adopted similar programs, which “enabled
the largest growth
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of private schools in the South’s history,” Suitts wrote
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in the journal Southern Spaces.

Across the old Confederacy, newspaper headlines announced private
schools opening with names like Robert E. Lee Academy, Wade Hampton
Academy, Jefferson Davis Academy. The Rebels were a favored mascot.

In March 1970, Camden’s local newspaper reported, “Promoters of
additional private school facilities in Wilcox County got a shot in
the arm this week.” The federal government had filed a plan for
desegregating the local schools.

“The action is expected by many to spur interest in the construction
of new private school facilities at Camden and Pine Hill,” the
article said.

Two weeks later, another headline reported: “Private School Plan
Shaping Up.” The story said 119 families in Wilcox had formed a new
foundation, voted to start a private school, and secured 16 acres of
land in Camden. It was the birth of Wilcox Academy.

Despite the obvious implications of the timing, many white people
across the South argued their motives for embracing the new academies
weren’t racist
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Publicly, they cited “choice,” “freedom” and higher-quality
(often Christian) education.

But those sentiments were hard to square with the fact that many
academies opened hastily, often in people’s homes, churches or
vacant buildings. Researchers who visited
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some of the new schools in the 1970s wrote that most were
“dilapidated, worn, a little dirty, short on supplies and materials,
cramped, offering few opportunities for enrichment.”

Wilcox Academy, however, enjoyed substantial financial support from
the start. When it opened in September 1970, it was “generally
regarded to be one of the most beautiful and well-equipped new schools
in the area,” the Wilcox Progressive Era newspaper reported.

The nearby public school started the year with half the students it
had the year before. Just two years later, Wilcox County public
schools enrolled 3,733 Black students and only 109 white ones.

Now five decades later, only a handful of white students are enrolled.

Under drizzly clouds one day this spring, Threadgill-Matthews
accelerated up the grassy knoll where Camden Academy once stood. With
her 5-year-old great-nephew in the back seat, she approached J.E.
Hobbs Elementary, a public school that now operates on the academy’s
former campus in a hodgepodge of structures. Her nephew’s classroom
was to one side in a low-slung building, painted blue with
sunshine-yellow doors.

On her other side, a timeworn sidewalk leads to nothing but a stand of
pine trees. Before the school district evicted her family and
condemned it, their home stood in that spot.

Her nephew slipped from the car with his Spiderman backpack, gave her
a hug, and headed into a classroom filled with Black children — just
as she once did on this campus.

Now 71, she tries not to dwell on the disappointment. So little has
changed since Brown v. Board, or the day when she and other Black
children made history and suffered terribly for it.

“It is really heartbreaking,” she said.

Tools of Resistance

Several years ago, an Auburn University history student reached out to
Threadgill-Matthews, hoping to interview her for a master’s thesis.
Amberly Sheffield had taught at Wilcox Academy, an experience that
left her so intrigued by the school and its origins that she was
devoting her thesis to the topic of segregation academies.

Sheffield grew up in the early 2000s in a neighboring county. Her
hometown was down to 1,800 people. Despite the small population, she
said, two segregation academies operated within a 20-minute drive of
her house.

Sheffield didn’t go to either of them. Although she is white, her
parents chose the public high school. About 70% of her classmates were
Black.

She liked it there. An honors student and cheerleader, she had Black
and white teachers. She hung out with a mix of friends and got to
learn about their different backgrounds. So she often wondered: Why
did so many other white parents pay to send their kids to the
academies?

She decided to find out.

In 2019, fresh off earning her bachelor’s degree, she landed a job
teaching high school history at Wilcox Academy. She moved to Camden,
40 miles south of Selma, and rented an old plantation house.

Heading into downtown, she saw attorneys, restaurants and clothing
boutiques operating from rows of storefronts adorned with flower
boxes. At one of the three stop lights, she passed the antebellum red
brick county courthouse. Down the road, the white paint peeled on
Antioch Baptist Church
[[link removed]],
where the KKK had once harassed congregants and a white man shot a
Black man dead as people gathered for a funeral.

On her first day at work, Sheffield headed into the academy’s
building, which was flanked by athletic fields and stands of trees.
Although the county is more than two-thirds Black, the classrooms
inside bustled with white children and teachers. The only Black staff
she saw were two custodians.

It felt like 1970, the year the school opened.

As she got to know her students, she probed: Why didn’t they go to
the public schools? She expected them to cite the academy’s
Christian education or the alumni in their family. And some did.

Others figured Wilcox Academy’s academics were better. But it was
hard to know. Unlike the public schools, private schools don’t have
to release test scores that would allow for comparisons.

To her surprise, many of her students spoke of fear. The public
schools were dangerous, they said. They might get shot. They didn’t
say it was because the students there are Black, “but that was the
sense I got,” Sheffield said.

She realized her students moved in bubbles of whiteness. Virtually all
of their friends were white. Their parents’ friends were white. And
they were never mentored or disciplined by Black teachers.

By then, Alabama was several years into a tuition scholarship program
for lower-income families that was used mostly by Black students and
could have helped more African American families apply to mostly white
private schools. But Wilcox Academy has chosen not to participate.

Nor have many of the segregation academies in neighboring counties,
state records
[[link removed]]
indicate. Private schools in Alabama whose student bodies are more
than 94% white have been least likely to opt in, one researcher found
[[link removed]].

Wilcox Academy’s principal did not respond to ProPublica’s
multiple emails and calls seeking to discuss the academy’s impact on
local school segregation, why it doesn’t participate in the existing
tuition-grant program and whether it will participate in the new
program.

Sheffield concluded that many families still chose the academy due to
race — the comfort of their own, discomfort with another — even if
they didn’t recognize it as such.

She stayed for one school year, then got to work on her master’s
degree. (She’s now a doctoral student at the University of
Mississippi studying segregation academies.)

In her master’s thesis
[[link removed]],
she tracked the formation of these schools across Alabama,
particularly “a tidal wave” of openings in 1970. That fall alone,
23 sprang up across the state, including Wilcox Academy. By 1978,
public school enrollment in seven Black Belt counties — including
Wilcox — was more than 90% Black.

“These segregation academies proved to be white resisters’ _most_
successful tool of resistance,” Sheffield wrote.

The Persistence of Division

In small towns like Camden, where everyone could know one another
well, people often don’t. It’s been that way since white settlers
arrived to bankroll new cotton plantations. They brought so many
enslaved laborers [[link removed]] that
the county became, and remains, predominantly Black.

Descendants of both enslavers and the enslaved still share the
community. But in so many ways, they remain separated. Because they go
to school apart and always have, only a few white children ride the
buses to school with Black peers. Black and white parents rarely build
friendships at high school football games or PTA meetings. They
don’t often carpool or invite each other over for a meal.

Wilcox County Superintendent André Saulsberry has lived this. He
graduated from the public schools he now leads. “Will we ever know
each other as people here?” he asked. “I’m not sure.”

He noted that it’s difficult to imagine how to create an integrated
school system where one has never existed. Black and white residents
in Willcox still eye each other across a chasm formed by centuries of
history.

“We don’t trust one another because we are so separate,” he
said.

Two years ago, some of the county’s mostly white large landowners
got Alabama legislators to derail the county and school board’s
request [[link removed]] to bring a
property tax increase to a local vote. Half of the money would have
gone to the nearly all-Black schools, including a new building for the
elementary school Threadgill-Matthews’ nephew attends. Its aging
structures have suffered two fires.

People who don’t send their children to public schools can lack a
reason to invest in them, Black residents here lamented. Many wonder
how Wilcox County would have fared if, instead of investing in the
academies, white families had devoted their time and resources to the
public schools.

“If people are together, they will understand each other in more
ways — and trust more,” Saulsberry said. “And we won’t
continue to die as a county.”

But some places in Camden have begun to draw Black and white people
together in ways that foster deep relationships. One is Black Belt
Treasures [[link removed]], where employees
coordinate arts programs for public and private school students. They
make a point of welcoming all comers. A Black artist, Betty Anderson,
who runs a small civil rights museum across the street, has become
close friends with the white women who work there.

One recent day, two of those women stood in the gallery judging a
public school’s art poster contest. Both were active with a local
racial reconciliation group that halted during the early days of
COVID-19. Both want the community to come together more.

Both also sent their children to Wilcox Academy. The decision, they
said, wasn’t easy or simple.

One of them, Vera Spinks, knows that people wonder: Why not just send
your kids to the public schools?

“It’s not as cut-and-dried,” she said.

The women vehemently deny the decision had to do with race. The
schools had long been divided by the time they faced the decision of
where to enroll their children. Both are Christians and said the
academy’s religious education was a key factor, along with its small
class sizes and personal attention from teachers.

Strong family ties also bond people to the academy. Kristin Law, the
other woman working with Spinks at the gallery that day, is an alumna
herself. “You now have three and four generations of students that
have gone to the school,” she said. “It’s become more about
school pride or tradition.”

Then there is the tremendous sweat equity parents put into the school.
There’s almost always fundraising underway. The academy’s annual
turkey hunt that raises money for the school dates back to 1971.
Parents and students create, haul, assemble and gather donations for
an annual prom extravaganza. The tradition has been passed down for 40
years.

Both women also said they are glad to see more Black and other
nonwhite students at the school. “We’re ready for coming
together,” Law said. “How do we do that?”

Crossing the Broken Bridge

Integration may yet come to places like Wilcox County — though not
in the public schools.

Alabama’s new school-choice program will be open to most of its
students in January 2025 and to all students in 2027. Under
Alabama’s existing tuition-scholarship program, about 60% of
students who have received the money in recent years have been Black.
The new program
[[link removed]], which
will open the door to wealthier families, could fund more than four
times as many students.

In places like Wilcox and many other Black Belt counties, the largest
pool of potential new private school enrollees is Black children.

In 2019, the year Sheffield arrived there, Wilcox Academy hired
Michael Woods, its first Black coach, to revitalize the basketball
program. Four years into the job, he now wrestles with the thorny
implications of the new voucher opportunities.

Black children still account for barely 5% of students in more than
half the schools in the South that likely opened as segregation
academies. That leaves white parents and students still firmly in
control, even in majority-Black communities. Now these academies will
confront an important question: If more Black students apply, how many
will white leaders accept?

Woods grew up in Camden’s public schools and describes the “broken
bridge” between the two communities. He never imagined that he’d
one day work at the academy and was surprised when its leaders reached
out to him. He arrived to see two Black students and no Black
teachers.

But he felt welcome enough that he brought his niece and nephew to the
academy, along with another Black student. Some have told him about
hearing racially insensitive comments but nothing he considers
outright racism.

“We are still set in those old-time ways,” he said. “But God has
made it better, and it’s time to let it go.”

He wants Black children to have the same opportunities that white kids
have long enjoyed. But for them to have a real choice, they need to
feel valued at the academy. Woods said he’s told the staff, “We
still have to give something to show these kids that we appreciate
them to get them there to the school.”

Saulsberry, the superintendent, doesn’t expect many to apply
regardless. “I’m not sure how comfortable, in some cases, it will
be if the Black child went there.”

Given that few public school students score at the proficient level on
math or reading assessments, leaders there know the district’s
standardized test results
[[link removed]]
could be used against it. But Saulsberry contends his schools provide
far more than test scores can capture.

His teachers must be certified, unlike at some private schools.
Students at the public high school also can become certified nursing
assistants, patient care technicians, medication assistants, welders,
brick masons and heavy equipment operators. They can get certified to
work in forestry. Plumbing is coming in the fall.

His students also can get mental health care, special education
services, bus services and free meals — which few area academies
offer.

“We try to look at the total child, not just the academic side,”
Saulsberry said.

Public school leaders know they will have to do more to sell strengths
like these. Wilcox Central High Assistant Principal Donald Carter
expects private schools to follow the college football playbook:
“They’ll be out to recruit now.”

When Woods coaches the academy’s teams, the stands in the gymnasium
fill with mostly white parents. The other teams are mostly or entirely
white as well. He wonders how it would feel if more Black families
filled those seats.

Woods said that he fields almost daily phone calls from Black parents.
“A lot of parents I have talked to want their kids in a private
school,” he said. “But they just couldn’t afford it.” Now, in
cautiously curious tones, they ask a question that echoes back 70
years: How would “the white school” treat their children?

How We Counted Segregation Academies

To identify schools that likely opened as segregation academies,
ProPublica adapted existing
[[link removed]]research
[[link removed]] using data from the National
Center for Education Statistics’ Private School Universe Survey
[[link removed]] to identify K-12 schools that were
founded in the South between 1954 and 1976 and were more than 90%
white as recently as 1993-1995, the earliest years for which student
demographic data is available. We also filtered out schools with
certain unique focuses, such as special education, or that were opened
around the same time for reasons that may not have primarily been due
to desegregation — many Catholic schools, for example, met this
criteria. To determine which schools were still operating, we compared
those schools to the most recent Private School Universe Survey data,
from 2021 to 2022. Our estimates may be an undercount, since data
about private school demographics was not collected until 1993, almost
two decades after desegregation ended, and because not all private
schools respond to the survey. To determine which schools were both
still operating and still disproportionately white, we compared their
demographics data to U.S. Census Bureau estimates for the counties in
which each school was located.

* school segregation
[[link removed]]
* Alabama
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Education
[[link removed]]
* education budgets
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
*
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